


Random Access Memory

by outrightmight



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Character Death, Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-22
Updated: 2013-07-22
Packaged: 2017-12-21 00:21:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/893620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/outrightmight/pseuds/outrightmight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Grief always hits you hardest at night</p>
            </blockquote>





	Random Access Memory

_I'll see you in the Drift._

He used to think that it meant you could still talk to them, still reach out to touch them. But it's different when it's just the memories in your head. 

Herc is awake, because the Drift is always with him. It's a prolonged bad dream, the kind you keep waking up and out from. The kind that you wake up gasping from only to realize you're still knee-deep and dreaming.

It's the hard download of everything your partner has in an instant, but no access to the mainframe. You can't bring it up like a program. Easy. 

Easy. But for a minute all he has is a long dark blank, like grief. Other memories float up like driftwood in his mind, knocking against the shores of his memories.

Max whines, but it is dark, and his master is gone. The bulldog hops up onto the bed and Herc lazily reaches out to find the familiar huge head. 

He thinks of his son, and the memories are long and loud. He remembers that morning at his mother's farmhouse in Australia when Chuck accidentally let all the chickens out of the coop. He'd glanced out the window, only to see his son running from the coop's crazed rooster. He remembered not just the way Chuck had looked -- young and blond and so very small, but how Chuck had felt: the slight edge of fear, the laughing success at a well-planned plot mostly going right. 

The next memory isn't his. In the tiny bunker, in the dark, he sucks in air into starving lungs because he's remembering Chuck going under, a quiet blue wave pulling him down, a surfboard looming up to hit him straight in the face. The flare of red as his son fought back, swimming up from the black bottom of the sea to the bright Australian morning. 

The next -- he's not quite sure. The woman looks like his ex-wife, but she isn't. It's the same easy grace and miles of sun blonde hair. In the memory he props himself up on his elbow, and looks down. It's a morning after, and the girl is some actress model Chuck bedded when the pilots were the rock stars of the world. He can taste her: cologne, something expensive, the faint tang of salt on her skin. He feels Chuck's bone-deep contentment and his lethargy. They'd long realized (since the first Drift) they shared a preference for leggy blondes. To their complete horror.

Herc grins into the dark. 

Max settles down next to his arm. He can hear the roar of a celebration. The base-wide party that's been going on since the Sealing. It doesn't seem to have any plans to stop, anytime soon.

He remembers the first time he ever picked Chuck up, when they didn't even have a name for him yet. How he was so small. How he was just the most perfect, arrogant being. Even as a child. Chuck doesn't have a real memory of this -- but he hopes that his son knows this feeling: the surge of pride he felt the first time he ever held the boy in his arms. He'd felt the same thing, when Chuck's words trickled over the radio. When he heard the roar of the blast and then, nothing. Only the ocean rushing in to fill the space where his boy once had been.

He doesn't weep.

_I don't have to tell you…_

They...

They'd been such a good team.

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little drabble -- it's my first time to write any fanfiction in over 10 years! ;___; But this movie really got to me. Especially the part of always having the memories of a Drift with you.
> 
> I hope you like it! Leave me a note and let me know!


End file.
